Wawa
A baby — straight from Quechua and Aymara, and a trap for anyone who learned "guagua" in the Caribbean.
Related lesson: Bolivian Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
La wawa se durmió recién.
The baby has only just gone to sleep.
Está esperando wawa para diciembre.
She's expecting a baby in December.
En Todos Santos hacemos t'anta wawas para la mesa.
For All Saints we make bread babies for the offering table.
What It Actually Means
La wawa is a baby or a very small child. It is grammatically feminine no matter what the baby is, it diminutivises to wawita, and it is entirely ordinary speech rather than baby talk — Bolivians use it in the clinic and at the registry office as readily as over the cot. Older Spanish spelling writes it guagua; the w spelling is now standard in Bolivia and follows the indigenous orthography.
Where It Comes From
From Quechua and Aymara wawa, a baby. In Quechua kinship terms it is specifically a child seen from the mother’s side, the father’s counterparts being churi and ususi — a distinction Spanish flattened on the way in. The word travelled with the Andes rather than with the empire: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, northern Chile and northwestern Argentina all use it, which is why it turns up in Andean Spanish long before you meet any other Aymara loan.
How Natives Use It
Constantly and warmly, and metaphorically at anyone behaving like an infant — “no seas wawa” is the standard rebuke to a sulking adult. It also anchors real cultural vocabulary: the t’anta wawas of Todos Santos, and wawa turning up in lullabies, clinic signage and government health campaigns. It is not slang so much as the local ordinary word.
Common Pitfall
The false friend, and it is a good one. In Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the Canary Islands, guagua is a bus. Two unrelated words that happen to have collided — the Andean one is Quechua wawa, the Caribbean one is not — and the sentence “me subí a la guagua” is a commute in San Juan and something physically alarming in La Paz. Note that the split is Andean versus Caribbean rather than American versus Spanish — Chile says guagua for a baby too.